Catherine Tait beams a wide smile when she looks back at the six years she spent holding one of the most important jobs in Canadian media: Running the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), the publicly funded media behemoth with divisions—in both English and French—in TV, radio, digital, podcasting and streaming. 

Overseeing a $1.2 billion budget and thousands of employees from Victoria to Iqaluit to St. John’s, Tait (’82) remembers several initiatives she’s proud to have cemented as president and CEO during her six-year appointed mandate from 2018–2024. “CBC is the engine for Canadian content in the country,” says Tait in a Zoom interview from her Ottawa home weeks prior to her scheduled remarks for Boston University College of Communication convocation ceremonies. “During the George Floyd protests, we asked ourselves, ‘What does an inclusive organization look like?’ We took it very seriously, and we went very deep with it, and I do believe that there is a legacy of diversity at the CBC—in our content and across our workforce—that I’m proud to have been part of.”

Tait also recognized how Netflix, Prime and their ilk were syphoning views from the public broadcaster while many people were cutting the cord and cancelling their cable subscriptions. Tait and her colleagues developed and launched the streaming service CBC Gem to “offer Canadians an all-Canadian choice among the sea of US services, which could be distinctive in its offering,” she says. “Canada has always been an early adopter of technology because of its close proximity to the US.” 

It wasn’t a breezy six years for Tait, though, as she faced a barrage of threats from Canada’s Conservative party to shrink the CBC’s budget. She also ran the CBC during the pandemic, when dozens of shows froze production. She saw how many creators on the TV and radio sides were getting desperate, inspiring her to help create a development fund to “keep people coming up with ideas so that people could get food on the table. Those were pretty rough years.”

A Life of Storytelling

Decades before she was managing a complex media operation brimming with journalists reporting from across the world, Tait herself was travelling to a wide swath of regions as a teenager. Her father, a diplomat, had the family moving from countries such as Greece, Switzerland, the UK and Canada, where she eventually enrolled at the University of Toronto.

Majoring in English and philosophy, she was intellectually nourished by what she was reading. She recalls, “I was engaged in a lot of comparative literature and reading Salman Rushdie and Garcia Marquez, and it was a very lively, rich time for me.”

While in Athens during a year off school, Tait was visiting the US Embassy when she came across a pile of pamphlets promoting university programs. She flipped through the brochure for BU’s College of Communication and it instantly resonated with her. “It seemed like the intersection between my various interests, such as my love of media and music and film, and it was attractive to me as a writer as well,” she says.

While at BU, where she earned a master’s degree in communications, Tait found her purpose. “I saw how people were being very creative, entrepreneurial, and how there was a real political awakening when [President Ronald] Reagan was elected,” she says. “I really soaked in all of that.”

Leaving BU for Paris-Pantheon-Assas University to earn a Diplôme d’etudes approfondies—“literally a ‘deep studies’ diploma, a sort of master’s,” as she calls it—gave Tait the opportunity to brush up on her French, which was a wise move for someone who would later be leading Canada’s bilingual public broadcaster.

She had a long stint in New York to help build the Independent Feature Project, a non-profit organization of independent filmmakers. “The 1990s was a really wonderful time for independent film and auteur cinema,” she says. “I got to meet creative forces like Eddie Burns, Jennie Livingston, Julie Dash and Kevin Smith.”

She dove deeper into media as the president and CEO of Halifax’s Salter Street Films, famously known for helping finance Michael Moore’s Academy Award-winning documentary film Bowling for Columbine. 

Tait also founded the digital production studio iThentic and earned a 2013 International Emmy Award for the interactive series Guidestones.

“Can you tell I love being a serial entrepreneur?” she asks rhetorically, a glint in her eye. “And being a storyteller is what I found interesting in my work in film and media. I always liked finding an idea, seeing how it comes together, and creating something out of it that would appeal to folks.”

Going Public

When Tait got the call to interview for the CBC president position, she wasn’t entirely surprised: She knew the Canadian government was keenly interested in appointing their first-ever female president of the CBC. 

Transitioning from managing dozens of employees to thousands of staffers was heady, but she learned quickly and felt energized by the responsibility. “A public broadcaster’s superpower is their journalistic position in local markets,” she says. “Just like what NPR has been doing, the community depends on CBC for information, from the weather to important news affecting their town.”

A public broadcaster’s superpower is their journalistic position in local markets…. The community depends on CBC for information, from the weather to important news affecting their town.”

Catherine Tait

She also stresses how she ensured the CBC prioritized reaching far-flung communities that may have been neglected by English-language media. “In our far north stations, we had an obligation to keep the Indigenous languages alive in our broadcasts and coverage,” Tait says.

When asked about the next step in her career, Tait is intentionally vague. She can’t confirm the details of her upcoming project, but she says she’ll always be committed to “ventures that will advance action against disinformation and online harm,” and goes on to add, “I believe we have an opportunity to offer people alternatives to the current internet and social media experience, control of which is hyper-concentrated and entirely profit-driven.”

That twinkle in her eyes dims somewhat when she’s asked about how a rising tide of Canadians and Americans have lost trust in media and government services, so much so Tait has had to fend off the aforementioned attacks from the Conservative party, which has long sought to defund the CBC. 

“That’s the chaos we’re living right now,” she says. “My message to young journalism graduates is always to remember that they are the custodians of trust, and that truth and fact equals trust. If people lose that alchemy, then we’ve lost everything.”